More delays to the Boris bikes as ‘teething troubles’ go on

Riding it out: a Serco employee at the firm’s Islington offices, where they build and store more than 1,000 Boris bikes

The roll-out of Boris Johnson's £140 million bike hire scheme is to be further delayed for tourists and casual users after a catalogue of teething troubles.

Transport chiefs have been forced to abandon plans to widen it beyond registered subscribers before the end of the month after numerous glitches with docking stations and the overcharging of thousands of cyclists.

This means that people will not be able to hire a "Boris bike" simply by swiping a credit card at a docking station until mid-September at the earliest.

Universal access has already been delayed once, when the Mayor unexpectedly revealed days before the July 30 launch that the scheme would open to unregistered users in "around four weeks". TfL now expects to set a date by the end of the month for the full roll-out once its contractor Serco has got the system "bedded-in properly".

TfL also wants to avoid expanding the scheme before the Notting Hill Carnival over the Bank Holiday weekend, which can attract a million revellers.

Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor's transport adviser, said: "Probably the first couple of weeks of September is what we are looking at. We always knew there would be a few teething problems and that is what we are working through."

The London Cyclist website has collated "a ton" of problems, including docking stations not releasing bikes and freeing space for others to be returned, shortages of bikes at main stations, an overloaded call centre and cyclists having their accounts frozen, so they cannot hire a bike.

London Cyclist founder Andreas Kambanis said: "It comes as a bit of a shock that there is yet another delay. It's a hit to the scheme as there are people out there who want to give it a go. The more it's delayed, the less likely they are to jump on board."

But he added: "Considering they can't even cope with the number of users so far, it would be a bit irresponsible of them to open the scheme to anybody."

Serco project director Alan Stannard said many problems stemmed from software failures and apologised. But he added that the company was tackling the problems, with a shortage of bikes and docking stations at Waterloo as a priority. Forty employees work round the clock redistributing bikes.

100,000 rides later

City Hall said today that the take-up of Boris bikes had "exceeded its wildest expectations". The 100,000th journey was made yesterday and there are about 45,000 users, who have paid up to £48 for an annual subscription. The 5,000 bikes are now used about 15,000 times a day.